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US Life Expectancy Declines For the First Time Since 1993 (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Washington Post: For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source) -- a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the United States. Rising fatalities from heart disease and stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses, accidents and other conditions caused the lower life expectancy revealed in a report released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics. In all, death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death. The new report raises the possibility that major illnesses may be eroding prospects for an even wider group of Americans. Its findings show increases in "virtually every cause of death. It's all ages," said David Weir, director of the health and retirement study at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Over the past five years, he noted, improvements in death rates were among the smallest of the past four decades. "There's this just across-the-board [phenomenon] of not doing very well in the United States." Overall, life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, from 78.9 in 2014 to 78.8 in 2015, according to the latest data. The last time U.S. life expectancy at birth declined was in 1993, when it dropped from 75.6 to 75.4, according to World Bank data. The overall death rate rose 1.2 percent in 2015, its first uptick since 1999. More than 2.7 million people died, about 45 percent of them from heart disease or cancer.
80 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks from 2004 to 2013. the US defense budget in 2015 was 637 billion dollars. However, The US Health and Human Services budget for 2015 is 1.3 trillion dollars. How is it we as a nation can outspend ourselves as the largest military power in the world, and still be faced with a declining life expectency rate?
Good people go to bed earlier.
TFA links to some summaries, but some of the categories (particular deaths due to accidents) are aggravatingly unspecific. Alzheimer's and accidents (unintentional injuries) had the largest year-over-year increases, at +4.0 and +2.7 deaths per 100,000. The other causes were all +1.5 or less. The increase in these two exceeded the increases in all the other top-10 combined.
I'm really curious to see what the breakdown for unintentional injury deaths looks like for 2015. We're in the middle of a prescription painkiller addiction epidemic which is going largely unreported by the media. Two years ago, overdoses displaced motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of accidental death - a position it had held for over a half century. This year we lost more famous people to overdoses than to gun violence, even though the media spent a vastly disproportionate amount of time focusing on the latter. The day of the UCLA shooting (1 murder, 1 suicide), there was a synthetic drug poisoning incident at a concert in Florida which killed 2 and sent 60 to the hospital. But the media concentrated almost entirely on the UCLA shooting.
Have you met the Vice President.
No ... googling ... Oh dear. This guy becomes president if Trump dies? No new election?
I wish the Donald a long and healthy life.
For the plebs, it's been dropping. Reason #2458 why raising the age for SS or Medicare is fascist BS.
The dumbest thing Americans do is assume that consumers act rationally, never-mind should be expected to act rationally. Health care is an insurance product that you want everyone to be forced to pay into so that they take the quickest path to getting back to contributing towards the GDP. None of this should be up to "consumers" in so far as somebody who needs health care gets to shop around if they're sick, blind, alone, or otherwise disadvanted in a miriad of other ways - nor providers, who shouldn't be looking at competition and profit margins for the kind of work they're in.
But I get it - you grew up with a hammer, and everything looks like a nail.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Causes of death are often complex, especially in older people, who may be suffering from a variety of issues simultaneously. Nonetheless, one underlying cause should not be overlooked: increasing obesity in the US drives a lot of other health issues.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I can not even begin to tell you how dumb this idea is. Are you seriously going to haggle with the emergency staff, as they're about to treat your heart attack? What about when your s.o. finds a lump in their breasts/chest? What are you going to tell your kid, when they get lymphoma? "Sorry sweetie. You deserve the best, but we can only afford to send you to that guy that operates out of a dumpster." And what's the point of scrutinizing your medical bills when the medical insurance companies in your area are monopolies.
Theocracies are hell and are up there with fascist dictatorships and totalarian communism in the really really shit ways to run a country stakes.
Bright future, if goosestepping whilst clutching a bible , is your thing.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Only 80 killed in 10 years, sounds like the defense was working for the most part.
The problem with healthcare is there is no ceiling to the cost and the end result is always the same, everyone dies eventually. Most of the early deaths appear to be lifestyle related anyway. Any reasonable person should prefer money to be spent on preventing unnecessary deaths (like terrorism) and just take care of themselves better to handle the longevity part.
The US now has 10 aircraft carriers, 2 under construction, and 1 planned. (source)
Military spending is 54% of our national budget, which is more than the amount of our deficit. More than the combined spending of the next seven countries.
What was that you were saying about spending ceilings?
Give people quality healthcare and they'll live longer.
Excellent plan. So now when someone gets say cancer, unless they happen to have tens or possibly hundreds of thousands stashed away for cancer-day, they can either try to apply for a loan or go the way of walter white. Advanced health care is so expensive, there is no practical way for most people to pay it out of pocket and the demand is inelastic (people who have a serious condition requiring immediate care do not have the time or the capabilities to compare prices and go to the other side of the country to get their treatment slightly cheaper) which make market based solutions terribly inefficient at providing it cheaply.
Moreover, since the demand is fairly static there's no way of effectively competing in a market with existing hospitals. Take something as simple as X-rays for example: a given area will have a fairly constant demand for xrays that's directly tied to the size of the population, let's say 10 000 as an example. But the machines and the staff to run x-ray machines cost a lot. The price of a simple machine is around a million. If we assume a life-span of 10 years for the device, that factors down to roughly 10 dollars an image as the base cost (+ staff costs + margins for the hospital). If someone else buys a device to compete with the first one, they too will have to try and recoup their costs, which will drive the base-price of an image up in both hospitals, raising the costs overall. If demand is split evenly between both it means the base-cost will double.
The infrastructure to provide advanced medical care cost enormous amounts of money, which acts both as a barrier to entry to the market, as well as making sure that increasing competition will lower the general efficiency of a system once you start getting more capacity than you'd actually need to satisfy the needs of a given population.
Or, you could just do what most other developed economies have already done and institute direct controls on pricing. Just having a public option for insurance allowing the government to leverage its size and negotiate down prices would be a start. There's no justifiable reason for allowing companies to rake in gigantic profits on a life-saving service that pretty much everyone will need at some point in their life.
To this day, I've never understood why the richest country on the planet allows its citizens to be left to die or saddled with massive debt over medical issues when there are several existing models of providing first world level advanced care at a much cheaper cost per capita (in fact, every single existing medical system is cheaper than the US one)..
But that requires treating health care as a right of citizens, not as a commercial commodity, which goes against the divine mantra of 'the free market is the solution to everything' that seems to dominate american politicians' discussion on health as if the only way to keep people healthy is to sell them health.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
But, you can't have poor people dying because they can't afford healthcare... and an individual cannot really negotiate with a large corporation - especially when the price for turning down their offer is to die.
So what can we do... mmm well we could pool a lot of people's money together. They could negotiate prices as a group - which can be on equal footing with the suppliers, and the group as a whole isn't "about to die" so the negotiations are no longer happening under duress. Then you can also use standard actuarial table structures to spread risk around so that those with little risk right now can help cover those with high risk - and get better results for all.
Of course, such systems work better the larger the pool - so you will want to get EVERYBODY in on it (that's a fundamental attribute of actuarial tables - they only WORK if they are BIG). Ideally - you want the pool to be available, in it's entirety, to pay for healthcare - so it should probably not be profit driven.
There was a system, very much like that, in Scottland in the 19th century - it was actually the first ever use of actuarial tables to spread risk, instituted by the Scottish church to help the wealthier congregations assist the poorer ones in their care duties.
But it doesn't seem ideal to have a religious organisation run this - after all, people don't all have the same religion and it would cause friction that would limit the pool of potential contributors.
Mmm we could set up a massive, non-religiously affiliated organisation to collect dues and manage the fund, handle the negotiations and take care of the payments when we need it !
Seems like a huge amount of effort to get set up and convince everybody to sign on though - and a bit of a chicken/egg problem since the greatest benefits (the negotiation power) only comes when you have lots of members, but to get lots of members you need to offer the benefits.
If only there was some organisation that was already established, had lots of negotiation power, the infrastructure to collect and manage dues with an already existing tiered-structure to scale your dues to your income, capacity to handle payments, no profit motive and no religious affiliation which we could leverage to run this national insurance scheme for us... I know we can use our government ! They're perfect ! This is EXACTLY the sort of thing we invented them for !
Oh wait, we just invented single payer healthcare.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And this is different from forcing everyone to pay for the military how?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
If a company's products cause illness, won't they loose any class action suit and have to pay millions? Don't they break the law by knowingly selling products that cause illness? I would think so.
How many decades did it take to finally bring tobacco companies under control? the truth is that we still haven't despite the science. food companies are using the same tactics of doubt to delay this fight and make as much money as they can while millions die.
You don't want to prevent illness and death in the first place by adequate consumer protection laws and their enforcement?
As long as we're making magical wishes, why don't we wish for bad people to not be bad. In the meantime, it's best to attack problems using the most effective methods.
A company can just kill a few customers here and there if they can get away with it financially? Only in the US can someone come up with such an idea...
A few people? They are killing millions of people and getting away with it because it's difficult to prove because it's the extended use of their product that kills. Therefore, it only makes sense to make it so that their actions catch up with them, even if it takes 40 years to manifest heart disease.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The horrors do not end there. If Air Force one crashes into the atlantic tomorrow with both Trump and Pence on board... the presidency goes to the speaker of the House.
The Vice President doesn't fly on Air Force One, he flies on Air Force Two. In fact, the President and Vice President don't spend much time together precisely for this reason.
Trump could piss in a jar, say "Drink my urine to absorb my business power" and his supporters would be lining up to buy it.
And when he gets sued after somebody discovered he stopped pissing in jars after the first one and the rest were just really expensive lemonade they'll call the judge biased against urolagnia.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
More precisely, the Republicans in Congress will repeal the ACA. Their plan is to replace it with something else that keeps the provisions they like, such as coverage for prior conditions and keeping sproggs on their parents' plan until age 26.
The problem for them will be that insurance companies are not going to support keeping those provisions as an unfunded mandate. That means Congress will have to cover the bill. Problem there is that Congress would have raise taxes which they pledged to that moron Grover Norquist they would never do.
A bigger problem will be that insurance companies are in it for themselves, covering people is only something they must do to stay in business. Government pulling back from the ACA means they have their privates hanging out there and so will pull back their plans. Congress figures they have 2-3 years to replace the ACA after they vote to repeal it, but the insurance companies probably won't wait and will start canceling policies early.
The only fix is to find money elsewhere in the budget to keep the wheels on. That will be difficult since they also wish to increase defense spending AND supply the jack needed for a large public infrastructure program, which the U.S. does need. They claim they will find the money elsewhere. But they've already cut discretionary spending quite a bit. Going after mandatory spending means mixing it up with the blue hairs and AARP and would take years.
Congress figures that relaxing regulations and fixing the tax code will increase GDP to such an extent that tax receipts will go up. Yet their plans will decrease tax receipts. During the Kennedy administration when taxes were relatively high, cutting taxes would get a big bang for the buck. Now it will only supply a whimper. Decrease regulations is all wonderful except that ignoring regulation and not properly regulating led to the last recession. And companies are not complaining about regulation except polluting companies. Relaxing regs on them means increased costs for the resulting pollution.
If the Republicans are correct and 95% of climate scientists are in on the global warming scam, then a bit more pollution won't matter. However, if they are wrong, then there will be increasing costs (regardless of deregulation) for droughts, stronger storms, etc.
And then there is the Black Swans out there. One really big national disaster, say a big California earthquake, means their budget projections will be very wrong very fast.
the US does not have the worlds most advanced medicine.
nor does it have the best system.
the systems in place throughout Europe are not "demonstrably inferior".
our quality, outcomes, and life expectancy are all below average, while our costs are the highest in the world.
most of Europe enjoys better outcomes, better quality of care, and higher life expectancies, for between 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of comparable care in the US.
All you've done is prove you don't know what you're talking about, nor do you know the definitions of socialism or fascism.
Again.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
the fallacy here is in thinking that the health care industry hasn't been acting like a market.
IT HAS.
For decades.
And the result has been that the people who need the health care aren't the ones being served, not really, not in the classical economic sense, but rather its the insurance and provider industries that are. Because the simple fact is that when you are sick, you ARE NOT a rational actor in an ideal market.
If your doctor says you need this 300k$ surgery to survive, and then you need to take this $500 a pill medication every day for the rest of your life, or you will die...
you're not going to shop around. you're not going to say wait, hold on. you're gonna say "OK".
And they know this.
Prices are high simply because they can be.
Because market fetishists delude themselves into thinking it will sort itself out, even though all evidence says otherwise, and the majority of other nations have figured out that it IS indeed possible to reign in costs through the power of government. We (the USA) are the only self-deluded outlier in this subject.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.